KIRKUS REVIEW

Sent to look into an accident involving two fellow officers
from the Avon and Somerset Police, DS Peter Diamond finds himself
improbably but compellingly on the trail of an unusually cold-blooded serial
killer.

Georgina Dallymore, the boss whom Diamond’s
recently been closer with than he’d wanted (Down
Among the Dead Men, 2015), wants her star investigator to exonerate Lew Morgan and Aaron Green, the two uniformed officers who’d crashed
their patrol car in an effort to avoid hitting Ivor Pellegrini, an old man
on a homemade tricycle who now lies in a coma at the Royal United Hospital. It’s too late to question Green, who was killed in the crash, and Morgan
didn’t see enough to settle things. But that mostly turns out to be beside the
point, because Diamond, who was responsible for spotting Pellegrini hours after
the accident, giving him life-saving CPR, and sending him to the hospital, is soon
pursuing an altogether different case. People close to Pellegrini have been
dying, apparently of natural causes, at an alarming rate in recent months. The
dead, all connected to the Great Western Railway Society, of which
Pellegrini has been a mainstay, include Massimo Filiput, his old friend
Cyril Hardstaff, Cyril’s wife, Winnie, and perhaps others. Who
would take the trouble to kill so many inoffensive old people, and how, and
why? It’s only after getting tricked into swallowing a red herring deeply laid by
the killer, who duly notes the triumph in an encrypted journal, that Diamond
eventually identifies his quarry, a deceptively minor character who turns out
to be a good deal more major than he’d suspected.

On the long side but so fast-paced you won’t care: another
absorbing, resourceful English procedural from one of the best.

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